


you're the only friend i need

by sevensevan



Series: pride month 2018 [29]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, M/M, Modern Day, Pre-Relationship, Standalone, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-30 21:54:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15105617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevensevan/pseuds/sevensevan
Summary: Eighth grade, at the time, is a little strange. Later, though, Steve will remember it as the year that defined the rest of his life.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> same universe as the other fic in the idle town series, but it's totally standalone. it's also technically a prequel, i think, since it takes place before the other one. i'm gonna go ahead and turn this 'verse into a lil series of vignettes, because that requires very little commitment and i have Issues with commitment, both emotionally and when it comes to completing things. anyways. enjoy.

Eighth grade is a strange year for Steve. He’s still short, still weak, still sick more often than not. But he has his mom, and he has Bucky, and that’s more than enough. For him, at least. For everyone else, not so much. Oh, his teachers like him, but the other students are cruel enough to negate that by far. Steve can’t figure out why they hate him so much. He doesn’t _do_ anything. He goes to class, he takes notes, he eats lunch in the library with Bucky and the librarian, who also likes him, he draws in his free time. He doesn’t have any friends besides Bucky; he doesn’t make an effort to make any. Bucky is all he needs.

But from how everyone else treats him, one would think he’s _evil_. They stare at him in the hallways, shove him around during gym class when he manages to participate without having an asthma attack halfway through, sometimes even follow him home if Bucky isn’t walking with him, yelling and threatening. He doesn’t know what he did, but he has to assume he’s done _something_ to deserve it.

To be fair, it’s mostly the boys who are mean. The girls don’t seem aware enough of Steve’s existence to be mean. The same can’t be said for Bucky, who, unlike Steve, has grown six or seven inches in the past year or two. He’s tall now, far taller than Steve, and muscular from playing on the lacrosse team and working in his father’s garage. His hair is just long enough to get wavy and messy, the kind of look that bothered him to no end when they were younger, and his clothes have switched from old, light wash jeans and beer company t-shirts with holes in them to skinny jeans and well-fitted, single color tees.

(The old, messy jeans and worn-out t-shirts are still around, of course. They appear when Bucky’s working, or when Steve is over at his place on the weekends, when he has no one to get dressed up for. Steve is the only one outside Bucky’s family who still sees them, and he takes a certain amount of bizarre joy in that.)

Steve isn’t the only one who’s noticed the changes in Bucky, not even a little bit. It seems like every girl at their school has noticed how…Steve hesitates to call him _handsome_ , simply because that feels like an admittance of some sort and he doesn’t like boys, not like that. But it’s an apt descriptor nonetheless for what Bucky has become. Long-limbed, strong, confident, all the things that Steve is not. Steve is terrified of what will happen when Bucky notices, when he realizes that he’s outgrown Steve.

But maybe he won’t, because in the middle of everything that has changed about Bucky, it’s the same mischievous smile that shines out from his face. His voice is deeper, but the cadence, the tone is the same. His hair is a bit longer than it used to be, but he pushes it back with the same quick, impatient motions of his hand he’s always had. He gets the same look in his eyes when he’s excited about something. In every way that matters, he hasn’t changed.

And through it all, he’s still there. When Steve gets beaten up on the first day of eighth grade, Bucky walks him home, glaring over their shoulders at the boys that try to follow them. He patches Steve up with hands roughened by garage work but incredibly gentle on Steve’s bruised skin. When Steve catches pneumonia and is out of school for nearly a month, Bucky does nearly all of his homework for him and makes excuses for the rest. Steve’s grades drop a bit as a result, but he’s thankful for it nonetheless.

When Sarah Rogers gets sick in December, when the doctors find a tumor in her heart (her _heart_ , of all places, Steve has never heard of that before; it’s rare, he’s told, as if that’s supposed to make him feel better) and some days she can’t get out of bed from the fever and dizziness, Bucky is _still_ there. Still solid. The only solid thing in Steve’s life, it feels like sometimes.

Until that changes, too.

“Hey, Steve?” Bucky says one day, when they’re on the floor of Steve’s living room, playing video games with the sound off while Sarah sleeps in her bedroom. She sleeps a lot these days. Steve can’t sleep, now, because he’s always checking on her to make sure she’s still breathing. They can’t afford the treatments, the surgeries, anything other than painkillers and prayers, and he’s dreading the day he checks on her and finds her stiff, quiet, motionless.

“Yeah?” Steve says, eyes focused on the screen. Bucky pauses the game, and Steve looks at him, sensing that, whatever he’s about to say, he wants to be looking at Steve when he says it.

“I—“ Bucky coughs. “I, um, I like guys.” Steve blinks. “I like girls, too. I think—I think I’m bi?” He says it like a question, like he’s asking if it’s okay for him to be this way.

“Okay,” Steve says. Bucky relaxes a bit.

“It’s not weird?” he asks.

“It’s a little weird,” Steve says honestly, because it _is_ and he doesn’t lie to Bucky. They don’t lie to each other. Bucky winces, visibly shrinking back. Steve shrugs. “But so was puberty, and we’re doing okay with that, right?” Bucky half-smiles.

“So we’re okay?” he says.

“Course we’re okay,” Steve says. “I’m not going anywhere.” Bucky’s tentative smile blooms into a full-blown grin, and Steve turns back to the TV to keep himself from blushing.

“I think I do, too,” Steve says after a few minutes, and it’s the first time he’s ever even confronted the thought. “Like guys, I mean.” He isn’t sure, not really. Sam in his history class is cute, but so is Peggy in his math class, and maybe this is just how everyone feels about everyone, maybe Steve is mixing up friendship and admiration with attraction.

But it doesn’t matter, really. Steve has Bucky, and he knows how he feels about Bucky. He can’t put it into words, but he knows. And that’s enough for him.

“Oh,” Bucky says. “Cool.” He shoots Steve’s character.

“Asshole,” Steve grumbles, shoving Bucky over. Bucky laughs, and yeah. Yeah, Steve doesn’t need to have all his shit figured out yet. He doesn’t know if he likes guys, doesn’t know if he likes girls, but he likes Bucky, and that’s all he needs. All he’s ever going to need.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're wondering about the chapter 1 of 2 thing, there's more stuff i wanna cover in this fic but it didn't feel right putting it in this chapter. expect chapter 2 either very soon or in three weeks. thanks for reading. i'm on tumblr @daisys-quake. leave a comment and kudos if you enjoyed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's the second part! i'm going out of town for a few weeks and won't be able to write, but i'll do my best to have another story in this 'verse before the end of july. i hope you like it :)

Sarah Rogers dies on a Sunday.

Steve doesn’t really understand what’s going on. He’s plenty old enough to; he turned fourteen last week (weeks after finishing eighth grade; it’s hard being younger than everyone else sometimes but he’s in the same grade as Bucky because of it, so he’ll take it), but everything still goes by in a blur. He’s the one who finds her, of course, who else would do it? He walks into her room that morning because for the first time in recent memory, she hadn’t woken him up for church.

He finds her stiff and cold and lifeless, and it doesn’t sink in until the ambulance shows up and the EMT declares her dead that she’s actually gone.

That’s not true. Three weeks later, Steve is sitting in a church pew at her funeral, Bucky by his side, and it still hasn’t sunk in. It’s a closed-casket funeral—Sarah had always said open caskets freaked her out, who wants to look at their dead loved ones’ bodies—and Steve stares at the wooden box that contains the body of his mother and feels absolutely nothing at all. Bucky has his arm around Steve’s shoulders, like he’s trying to comfort him, and Steve appreciates it, even likes the contact, but he doesn’t—there’s nothing to be comforted. Steve doesn’t feel _anything_. He’s not angry or sad or…anything. Just empty. Not the sort of awful emptiness that makes one want to cry just to feel something. A peaceful sort of oblivion, blank-eyed and empty-chested. Hollow.

Steve keeps expecting it to start hurting. He goes to stay with Bucky’s family while the courts figure out what to do with him, and he sleeps in Bucky’s bed, listening to Bucky’s breathing on the floor, and waits for it to start hurting. He waits to suddenly burst into tears, to stop eating, to feel torn, to feel _broken_.

The pain never comes.

Steve gets sent to a foster home the first week of August. It’s not that far away, but Bucky hugs him so tightly when he leaves that Steve would swear he’s moving to England.

The foster home isn’t bad. It isn’t good, either; the woman who owns it (he can’t think of her as his foster mother, his mother is six feet under the earth and no prefix will ever make the word _mother_ mean anyone ever than Sarah Rogers) is…not cold, exactly, but businesslike, expedient. She buys Steve a pass for the subway and gives him a weekly allowance and occasionally brings home takeout, but beyond that, he’s expected to take care of himself, as well as his new, younger foster sister.

Her name is Natasha. She’s been staying at the foster home two weeks longer than Steve. She’s ten years old, and within a week of arriving, Steve understands Bucky’s fiercely protective treatment of his little sisters better than he ever thought he would.

That’s not to say that he and Natasha take to each other particularly well. Natasha is foreign, born in Russia, Steve gathers. Something about being adopted into an American family and said adopted family dying tragically. Her English is perfectly fine, she’s been in the U.S. five years now, but she doesn’t seem to have any interest in speaking it to Steve. She’s more likely to snap at Steve in Russian than anything, and while Steve has no idea what Russian curse words sound like, Natasha’s tone tells him all he needs to know.

Even still, Steve comes home one day from Bucky’s house (three subway stops and a five minute walk away; Steve hopes he hits a growth spurt soon, he’d feel much better wandering the city by himself if he wasn’t ninety pounds, five feet tall, and asthmatic) to find Natasha asleep on the couch. He manages to pick her up, finding an unexpected strength somewhere in his arms, and carries her to the room they share, setting her in the bottom bunk and tucking her in.

(She has nightmares. Steve hears her in the middle of the night, kicking and thrashing in her sleep on the bunk beneath him, mumbling in Russian. Steve has never asked her what they’re about. She always sounds terrified when she talks in her sleep.)

Suddenly it’s almost September, and Steve is going to high school next year. He’s still short, and skinny, and frail, and he still hasn’t mourned for his mother.

He and Bucky are walking home (Steve thinks of the Barnes apartment as home; the only thing that feels even a little bit like home where he lives is Natasha), Bucky’s arm around Steve’s narrow shoulders as he talks excitedly about the movie they’ve just seen, when everything changes. Steve can’t put a finger on _why_ , and he’ll never be able to, but he looks up at Bucky, and suddenly everything is different. The afternoon sunlight is outlining Bucky’s face, his grin, the beginnings of boyish stubble, the way his hair flops into his eyes. Bucky’s arm around his shoulders is suddenly heavy, warm, meaningful. Steve steps out from under it, and Bucky pauses mid-sentence, giving Steve a questioning look.

“Steve?” he asks. Steve looks around, spots a probably-not-dangerous alleyway to their left, and pulls Bucky into it. “Steve, what’s up?” Steve squares his shoulders, looking up into Bucky’s eyes. Bucky stares back at him, confusion evident on his face. Steve doesn’t let that deter him.

He leans up and kisses Bucky.

It’s Steve’s first kiss. It’s definitely not Bucky’s, but now that Steve is thinking about that, it doesn’t bother him. Because Bucky is here, now, kissing Steve back.

“Huh,” Bucky breathes, licking his lips when Steve pulls back. And now, now Steve is scared. “Well, that’s new.”

“Not really,” Steve admits, shrugging. He can’t look at Bucky now. His face is burning. What if Bucky doesn’t want this? What if _this_ goes wrong? What if Steve is just—just bad at it? The kissing and—everything else.

“Guess not,” Bucky agrees. He throws that arm around Steve’s shoulders again, only this time, it’s purposeful, meaningful, affectionate instead of careless. Maybe it was never careless. Maybe Steve is just really, really slow on the uptake. “C’mon, punk. Let’s go home.” The word _punk_ is spoken like a term of endearment, and a little of the tension and nerves leave Steve’s body.

Bucky’s still here. Bucky’s always going to be here. Bucky is Steve’s best friend, kissing or no kissing, and that’s not going to change.

Steve’s mother had always told him to be brave. Steve figures it doesn’t get much braver than kissing his best friend.

And it’s only now, walking out of the alley with Bucky’s arm around his shoulders and ridiculous grins on both their faces, it’s only now that Steve thinks of his mother and it begins to hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! what characters do you wanna see next in this 'verse? there's plenty more to tell with both stucky and wanda & natasha, but i'm willing to take suggestions :) i'm on tumblr @daisys-quake. leave a comment and kudos if you enjoyed.


End file.
